Seth Godin's Blog, page 48

Powerful metrics with hidden variables

What factors lead to a search result showing up on page 1 or page 5 of Google?

What about the popularity bar in iTunes? How does it work?

Who decides what your salary is compared to the person down the hall?

On this road, in this town, what's the threshold before you'll get a speeding ticket?

In that magazine article, what's the methodology for ranking these semi-famous people?

How did this image show up in recommended?

There are ratings and rankings that ostensibly exist to give us information (and we are supposed to use that information to change our behavior).

But if we don't know what variables matter, how is it supposed to be useful?

Just because it can be easily measured with two digits doesn't mean that it's accurate, important or useful.

[Marketers learned a long time ago that people love rankings and daily specials. The best way to boost sales is to put something in a little box on the menu, and, when in doubt, rank things. And sometimes people even make up the rankings.]

            

You'll pay a lot, but you'll get more than you pay for

That's as useful a freelancer marketing strategy as you can fit in a single sentence.

            

How to give a five-minute presentation

Give a four-minute presentation and take your time.

The alternative is to try to give a six or seven-minute long talk in five minutes. To rush. To get flustered. To go over your time. To act in a way that belies your professional nature.

Nope. Better to stick with the four-minute approach.

The thing is, you'll never have enough time to tell us every single thing in enough detail. It would take you years.

Portion control is your friend. Figure out how big the plate is and serve just the right amount.

            

Character matters (if you let it)

Choosing to develop character is difficult, because it requires avoiding the shorter, more direct path. It can be slow, expensive and difficult work.

And rewarding character is difficult as well, because someone is probably offering you an alternative that's cheaper or faster. A sure road to a quick payday.

But...

Every time we avoid the easy in favor of what's right, we create ripples. Character begets more character, weaving together the fabric of our culture, the kind of world we'd rather live in.

            

What happened and what will you add?

Is it outside of the canon?

The internet, with instant access to all known history and science, was supposed to help us all get in sync, to understand what we knew for sure.

But of course, when everyone has a keyboard and a camera, it's up for grabs.

Some people get frustrated when others use the word "enormity" to mean, "very very enormous." That's because they know that enormity means "unspeakably horrible," and they're worried that if enough people use it the wrong way, they'll no longer be able to use it the right way, and a nuanced word will disappear.

Language is plastic, it changes over time. Who knows what 'dap' used to mean, or what it will mean tomorrow? What happens to the serial comma or the other refined elements of punctuation? Language is a reflection of who we are and how we speak and it's foolish to insist that it stay the same as it always was.

Work that alters the canon, that begins outside of it but then is incorporated into it, is how our culture grows.

Facts and history, though, fade away if we let them become plastic.

It probably took Descartes 50 years to reach half a million people with his ideas about philosophy and the mind-body problem. The School of Life, with millions of viewers on its YouTube channel, was able to reach half a million people with its video on the mind body problem in just a year. The issue, as dozens of folks have pointed out, is that the video has nothing at all to do with the actual mind body problem, and simply makes up new stuff.

Descartes isn't here to defend himself, and I'm not sure he should count on me to stand up for him, but it points to a bigger problem: Everyone has the authority to have a media channel, but responsibility is in short supply.

We need new ideas, but if it's not in the canon, it's worth labeling properly--a new idea to consider, not an accurate version of what came before.

If you want to earn trust, it helps to either get it right or to fix it once you've discovered that you've gotten it wrong.

"Your mileage may vary" is a useful way to think about our experiences, but sometimes we don't want our mileage to vary. Sometimes we want to know what actually happened, how to compute acceleration or decode a cultural artifact. Sometimes we want to know about the work that came before.

PS friggatriskaidekaphobia, or the more popular term, Triskaidekaphobia, was first used in print by Isador Coriat about a hundred years ago. Be safe today.

            

On taking a hint

Hints are free.

You're welcome to take them and use them to do better work.

Often, the real truth is wrapped in a hint, because a direct statement is too difficult, it feels too risky. Unwrapping the hint to find the truth is a life skill.

Sometimes, you might try to take a hint when none was offered. Sometimes, we imagine that people are telling us something that they're not. If you have that experience often, it's totally okay to ask for clarification.

The rest of the time, if someone offers you a hint, take it.

(And if you're working closely with someone, it's probably worth skipping the hints and choosing to communicate with clarity instead).

            

What do advertisers want?

You can't be thoughtful about culture without thinking about media, and you can't think about media without thinking about who's paying for it.

Advertisers (mostly) want mass. They'd like the SuperBowl, the home page of Google, the shortest route to the largest number of people. It's easier that way. It's more fun. It requires less risk.

But of course, it costs too much.

Hence data. Data's a way of getting mass, but just the mass they're hoping for. It's a way of spending less in total (but more per person) in the hope that the yield will go up. It's also the trend, and advertisers love trends.

The march toward data has been going on since the early online days, at least 1999, the dawn of internet advertising, because the internet can't be a mass medium. Too many channels, too much interaction. And as it splinters further but requires ever more money to run, the race for data is on.

In this week's Akimbo, I talk about being there at the beginning of the surveillance race, as well as the option that advertisers and the public can (surprisingly) agree on: limits. Limits give advertisers the guardrails to go back to what they actually want to do, and they give the rest of us a chance to feel safe in a non-commercialized, non-invasive space.

If we don't push for meaningful legal limits on ad encroachment, hyper-targeting and surveillance, there aren't going to be any. The ratchet will keep turning.

            

Why even bother to think about strategy?

There's confusion between tactics and strategy. It's easy to get tied up in semantic knots as you work to figure out the distinction. It's worth it, though, because strategy can save you when tactics fail.

If a tactic fails, you should consider abandoning it.

But that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with your strategy. Your strategy is what you keep doing even after you walk away from a tactic.

A real estate broker could decide that her goal is to get more listings.

And her strategy is to achieve that by becoming the most trusted person in town.

There are then 100 tactics she can use to earn that trust. She can coordinate events, sponsor teams, host community meetings in her office, sponsor the local baseball team, be transparent about her earnings, hire countless summer interns at a fair wage, run seminars at the local library, etc. ...

It doesn't matter if one or two or five of the tactics aren't home runs. They add up.

But if once, just once, she violates someone's trust and expectations, the entire strategy goes out the window.

Tactics are disposable.

Strategy is for the long haul.

            

Speaking up about what could be better

Solving interesting problems is the best work we can do.

It's a practice that has built the very best parts of our culture.

Solving interesting problems begins with posing them--which means being willing to speak up about what could be better before we know how to make it better.

We see these problems, all of us do. But they're easy to ignore if we're hoping for a quick win. Instead, patience and empathy define us as the humans we seek to be. 

Too often we get trapped believing we need:

Certainty

Quick answers

A guarantee

If you want those three things, you're missing the path. The search for quick, guaranteed and certain results will almost always undermine the creativity you're after.

Creativity is a step on the way to making things better. 

As we've built the altMBA (more than 2,000 students so far), the need for creativity has become ever more urgent.

The web is littered with easy promises and simple call & response patterns. It's antithetical to creativity. Instead, our social networks have turned us into unpaid factory workers, toiling in a giant system, one that pushes us to feel shame, to be in a hurry, to worry about nothing but the surface.

That's not where creativity comes from and that's not what creativity is for.

Possibility and responsibility are available to anyone who wants them. That could be us, any of us.

Seeing the world as it is, offering people dignity, choosing to make a difference... none of these are fast and easy paths, but we do them anyway.

Will you?

Please consider joining us for the altMBA. The work matters.

            

But what about the people who don't care?

How do we work with someone who doesn't seem to care?

I have a hard time believing that people can't care. I think that they often don't see. They don't see what we see, or interpret it differently.  Or if they see, they see something you don't see. But if they saw what you saw, and it was related to how they saw themselves, they'd act differently.

The gap is usually in the difficulty of getting the non-owner to see a path to happiness that comes as a result of acting like an owner. Most people are taught to avoid that feeling. Because it always comes with another feeling--the dread of responsibility.

 

[PS I'm told that Typepad, where this blog is hosted, is doing some technical work. As a result, publishing and uptime may be funky and unpredictable for a time. On their behalf, my apologies.]